That's not the thing that's supposed to screw with your head. That's them, behind the scenes, secretly formulating a devious plan to screw with your head. Are we supposed to be shocked/intimidated by these plans, or mildly irritated that people who went to grad school have acquired government jobs?

You know what would screw with my head? Sharing the internet with government operatives who are attempting to execute this plan? No: Having to sit through an in-person session where someone was doing a PowerPoint presentation with these diagrams.

Greenwald breathlessly asks: "Who would possibly trust a government to exercise these powers at all, let alone do so in secret, with virtually no oversight, and outside of any cognizable legal framework?" Could he make a diagram of that question? Seriously, what powers? It's the same old power to use language to manipulate our thinking that government has always used.

The defense against this well-known power is good reading skill, critical thinking, more writing and more reading and more debate. Be skeptical. There are mobys and sock puppets on the internet, and some of them are working for a government. Know it. What "oversight" or "cognizable legal framework" could possibly save us? If you don't trust the government, don't trust the government. Don't whine for the government to save you. Save yourself. I'm trying to save us... by laughing at those diagrams. Come on!

It always amazes me (but not so intensely, as repetition has modified my expectancy) that the (leftists) who warn of governmental malfeasance seem to think the remedy is bigger, stronger, more pervasive government -- called "oversight."

That's only a basis for despair that we can maintain freedom and democracy. Either we can climb out of that hole, through developing those skills, or we are lost.

First of all, freedom and democracy are not cognates or synonyms. Personally I think we can preserve our freedom, but only if we become less democratic, not more. We need to move back to more of a republic. One of the reasons for returning to republican (as opposed to Republican) ideas and procedures is that it is much more effective at reducing the impact of low information voters.

Psychological Operations (Psyops) has long been the staple of counter-insurgency operations.

e.g. winning hearts and minds

Those psyops operations attempt both to increase the alignment of the recipients minds toward the government's goals and to create dissidence between the recipient and the goals of enemy operations such as AQ.

In other words, words as weapons. Intrinsically the weapons are not evil, they can be good for US interests when used against AQ or bad for US interests when used against US Citizens in the US.

The grey areas emerge when the context is to prevent US persons from exercising their 1st amend right to speech and communication with entities that the Government thinks are our enemies (AQ sure, Tea Party? )

The good news is that such PowerPoint presentations have absolutely no chance of actually being implemented. Within minutes of being presented, each bullet and action is being questioned. Then, even if someone in a position to make a decision actually buys into the inoperable scheme, it gets broken down into pieces to be tasked out to separate offices. These offices then assign their part of it to whoever isn't busy, or whoever thought it was cool, or whoever is the boss' pet, with little thought to expertise. Finally, all the individuals from different offices meet many times before deciding it is all unworkable and must be downsized - all the while giving unfailingly optimistic reports up the chain. In the end, the lack of progress becomes evident even to the people who authorized it and the whole thing gets shunted aside for the next grand scheme.

It's not a secret. Everyone's very open about it - or do you think "THINK GREEN" bullshit just popped up out of nowhere?

You are correct about the "nudging". It is merely the usual social pressure of the dominate culture to coerce behavior conformity.

Human nature in action is all this is, which really highlights why GOVERNMENT needs restraints. Government becomes the tool of whatever group is looking to enforce their desired conformity using social coercion, as well as the force of law, if they can get away with it.

Old wine, new bottles, New boss, same as the Old boss, etc. rinse, repeat.

I as checking StatCounter last night to see who was visiting my blog and I found this strange entry (actually twice) at this post from Blue Coat Systems with a cryptic note included in the html: "Notify Coach."

When I clicked on the link I reached a message that this particular address was not an internet link and what I see is all I will see.

So I went looking for Blue Coat Systems on the internet and found this link at CNet. Scary stuff.

A concerted, deliberate effort by a group of leftist political operatives, the National media and Democrat Party politicians to fabricate a "spontaneous protest of the People" against rich people and corporations in order to justify a "solution" of yet more Big Government thievery.

It was the usual ACORN-AFL/CIO-SEIU funded astro-turfed fakery.

They couldn't pull it off: The in-fighting and naked greed of the protest organizers destroyed the operation within a couple of weeks, because of alternate media exposure of just how skanky and awful those protestors were.

If one works for the government, one is pretty much forced to endure PowerPoint presentations, many of which are even worse that these charts. I know; I've sat through some of them. Richard Feynman noted the problem in his second autobiography What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Be skeptical. There are mobys and sock puppets on the internet, and some of them are working for a government.

Apparently we should add Crack to list of government employees.

The defense against this well-known power is good reading skill, critical thinking, more writing and more reading and more debate.

Now all you have to do is inculcate these skills into low information voters!

Crack is a white guy,...a snitch and provocateur has always been the second job of the black race man.

Hilarious. But, if you ever pick up Donnell Alexander's "Ghetto Celebrity", you'll also find these words:

"Coming from where I did, my life felt so outrageously contraband that I couldn't believe I was getting away with it. So all of my confidants had to be narcs. Except the Crack Emcee. I couldn't see how even the CIA was advanced enough to hide someone like him among their minions,…"

Maybe these intentionally bad PowerPoints were intentionally leaked in order to lull you into a false sense of security. Maybe the government really is competent, and ObamaCare is a carefully designed disinformation campaign.

PB Reader said... The article lacks evidence of where this effort was deployed and against whom.

Are we to believe that the people working at the NSA are above temptations to use their technology for political purposes like the IRS, EPA, DoJ, etc.? This kind of thing can swing close elections. Preservation and expansion is the primary mission of all bureaucracies (and the NSA is a bureaucracy). I’ve worked on the perimeter of the Intelligence Community for most of my adult life and have no illusion that these are somehow “better” people who’d never abuse their office for political purposes.

In the words of Bertha Lewis, “these new entities are carrying on ACORN’s work of organizing low- and moderate-income folks… [We have created] 18 bulletproof community-organizing Frankensteins that they’re going to have a very hard time attacking.”

'"Except the vast majority of proles have neither the ability or the inclination to exercise these things."

That's only a basis for despair that we can maintain freedom and democracy. Either we can climb out of that hole, through developing those skills, or we are lost.'

It's only despair about democracy if we allow government - particularly the most distant (federal) level - to be huge and intrusive. We had a lot of freedom and a democracy at least as effective (and destructive) as today's when we had an illiterate populace, but a tiny government.

I suppose we can let the government be big, intrusive, and coercive if we all stay on our toes and constantly monitor everything, but why. You don't need to constantly exercise critical thinking skills about a government small enough to be drowned in the bathtub. And despite your optimism, critical thinking skill may be no match for a government big enough to use Lake Superior for a foot bath.

Communication doesn't happen spontaneously. It's the result of volitional acts by natural people.

So each of the nodes on the PowerPoint has people associated with them.

Which makes me wonder if Ezra Klein, the ringmaster of JournoList, is or was an operative of a government institution. It's freaking obvious that if Klein didn't exist, some agency would have created him. I wonder if something in the Snowden bolus of purloined intelligence would corroborate this.